A Quarter of a Century of Civilian Protection: Contested Concepts and the Problem of Sovereignty

ABSTRACT

The protection of civilians has moved from the periphery to the core of public perceptions of what UN peacekeeping is for. At the same time, the operational and tactical arts of civilian protection have become better developed, more sophisticated, and more widely known. This turn towards protection has improved UN peacekeeping and, more importantly, saved civilian lives. This piece shows that together, the essays in this collection suggest a need to think more holistically about by situating practices of UN peacekeeping along a broader continuum of practice comprising local actors, unarmed civilian protectors at one end, a more fulsome understanding of the role of UN police and national authorities in the middle, and – at the other end – difficult questions about humanitarian intervention.

It is now a quarter of a century since the UN Security Council began mandating peacekeeping operations to protect civilians from harm. Since then, the protection of civilians has moved from the periphery to the core of public perceptions of what UN peacekeeping is for. UN missions now tend to be judged on this more than anything else. At the same time, the operational and tactical arts of civilian protection have become better developed, more sophisticated, and more widely known. Consequently, protection is now partly constitutive of peacekeeping itself. This turn towards protection has improved UN peacekeeping and, more importantly, saved civilian lives. Using different datasets, cases and methodologies, researchers have shown convincingly that the protection of civilians by UN peacekeepers reduces civilian victimisation, including at the sub-national level, and that the scale of positive impact in correlated to the number of peacekeepers deployed (Hultman 2013, Bove and Ruggeri 2016, Hultman et al. 2019). But as the essays in this collection well demonstrate, important questions remain about core concepts and practices of civilian protection. There are some questions yet to be posed and growing evidence that protection itself might be reshaping the politics surrounding peacekeeping in unexpected ways. In this essay, I want to briefly reflect on some interrelated sets of issues arising from this collection that might animate future research and debate. These relate to the clarification of concepts of protection, time, and agency, and the problem of sovereignty arising from the politics of protection itself. Together, the essays in this collection suggest a need to think more holistically about by situating practices of UN peacekeeping along a broader continuum of practice comprising local actors, unarmed civilian protectors at one end, a more fulsome understanding of the role of UN police and national authorities in the middle, and – at the other end – difficult questions of non-consensual humanitarian intervention.

Concepts

Though the word is now a commonplace in the UN lexicon, the concept of protection remains difficult to pin down with precision. Incongruously, this may be because so many different actors have tried to define it precisely, leaving us with a bewildering range of definitions. Broadly speaking, definitions can be categorised as ‘wide’ or ‘narrow’, with some articulating protection in terms of rights (distinguished as ‘wide’ if, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) they include full satisfaction of all human rights or ‘narrow’ if referring to only some rights, usually those associated with bodily integrity) and others as a response to violence (thus protection is freedom from violence or coercion, defined widely to include non-physical or narrowly to include only physical or sometimes only widespread physical). Indeed, it makes sense to conceptualise protection as a continuum not a thing, since people rarely find themselves wholly protected or unprotected but rather in a condition of greater or lesser protection. Moreover, we can borrow from work on intersectionality the idea that people may be threatened or protected in different ways simultaneously and that different agents, rights, and strategies may be engaged in the management of each of those axes of threat and protection. But there ought to be a basic floor of protection, a core of rights or liberties, without which others cannot be enjoyed. This core of protection should be conceptualised as freedom from direct physical harms. That should explicitly include protection from UN peacekeepers and civilian staff, including harm to civilians caused by UN military action and harm caused by sexual exploitation and abuse. On the latter, it stands to reason, as Kihara-Hunt and Henry point out, that the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers be understood as a central component of the protection of civilians and not as a different or subsidiary area of policy.

The relative narrowness of this conceptualisation is driven in part by an impulse to avoid conceptual overstretch, whereby protection becomes so widely drawn as to mean almost any action undertaken by a mission in pursuit of its mandate, but also by the need to properly situate protection in relation to other human rights and political accord. Understood this way, protection is situated as a necessary precondition for other goods or mission objectives. That is, unless a basic level of protection is granted to a civilian population, members of that population can neither enjoy their basic political, social, and economic rights nor participate freely in politics. Given that the desired endpoint of most peacekeeping operations is a stable peace based on a national political accord actualised in local settings across the country, it follows that political participation is a necessary condition, that this is possible only in conditions where basic rights can be claimed, and that, in turn, it is possible, only if civilians are protected from direct harm. There is, in other words, a hierarchy of claims for political participation that is dependent upon civilian protection. An individual’s freedom from direct bodily harm cannot be meaningfully traded away for other goods. Once that is securely achieved; however, it becomes more possible to pursue broader protection. This presents us with further questions of scale and the distinction between public and private which cannot be addressed here, but to be conceptually and normatively coherent protection ought to be founded on a core of individual rights. In practice, of course, peacekeepers, states, NGOs, and others will always have to make difficult choices about how best to satisfy those rights within the confines of available resources, but these are questions of strategy and politics not conceptual.

The practice of protection in peacekeeping operations has, however, impacted upon another core concept: time. In theory, peacekeeping was prefaced on a particular conception of what we might call ‘conflict time’. Traditional peacekeeping, it was often said, occurred in the temporal space between war and final peace agreement, a space characterised by a durable ceasefire, the separation of forces, and a degree of mutual commitment to a peace process. The spectacular failure of missions in Rwanda and Bosnia was commonly attributed to the fact peacekeepers were deployed in the wrong temporal space, that is into conditions of ongoing armed conflict. Though the formal response to that problem, found in the Brahimi report and reiterated more recently in the Cruz report, was to make peacekeeping fit for situations of armed conflict, in practice the Security Council doubled down on traditional temporal reasoning in mandating new missions by requiring the existence of ceasefires and political processes as a precondition for the deployment of peacekeepers. At the same time, the Council adopted a much more flexible approach to mandate extensions. In South Sudan, for example, the Council not only extended a mandate but also expanded the mission even once all the enabling conditions for peacekeeping had evaporated. This points us to the fact that the traditional temporality of peacekeeping, always something of a fiction, is now deeply at odds with both the practice of peacekeeping itself and the realities of the armed conflicts it is despatched to police. The emergence of the protection of civilians as the principal objective has contributed to this in two principal ways. First, by moderating but not altogether deterring outbursts of anti-civilian violence, UN peace operations help sustain conditions of protracted low-level conflict punctuated by sharp but brief upswings of violence. These are conditions neither of war, where political decisions are made by force of arms, or peace/post-conflict, where political decisions are made through politics, but of a new and seemingly intractable kind, their intractability stemming from the fact that armed belligerents feel the need to accept neither the decision of the battlefield (for UN peacekeepers inhibit violence, thus preventing one side defeating another) nor the conference room or parliament (since they retain an option to use force against civilians as they deem it necessary or profitable). In these contexts, the distinctions between political violence and criminal violence, greed and grievance, become blurred as do command structures and chains of authority as political actors outsource regularised violence to others so as to evade responsibility whilst reaping the rewards (e.g., Ferguson 2020).

This is a problem compounded by one aspect of what I will later describe as peacekeeping’s ‘sovereignty trap’, which is that the common end state of peacekeeping in civil wars – the restoration of state authority – falsely assumes the existence of a state committed to governing for the common good, when in fact state institutions have been captured by factional interests. This creates perverse incentives for the host state which may come to see little need to change behaviour to facilitate peacekeeping withdrawal, since the UN mission helps insulate the state from armed rebellion and provides sources of income and legitimacy, whilst those opposed to the state may make temporary bargains to achieve material or political goals but are unlikely to relinquish their independent means of force or its use (De Waal 2009). The result is a growing number of missions without obvious pathways to an end. These are missions that certainly contribute to the better protection of civilians but that do so in conditions of ongoing (if sporadic) armed conflict where the core problems of governance for the common good remain unaddressed.

Agency

Another unanticipated effect of the rise to prominence of the protection of civilians has been the increasing militarisation of peacekeeping. This gradual progression towards greater militarisation in the name of protection, unevenly distributed and more evident in some missions than in others, was foreshadowed by the Brahimi Report in 2000 which established an expectation that peacekeepers ought to use force to protect civilians should that be necessary. Seemingly honoured more in the breach than in practice, the aspiration evinced by Brahimi gradually transformed the composition and orientation of peacekeeping towards the increasingly robust and kinetic. A tendency identified by some analysts (e.g., Karlsrud 2018), the militarisation of peacekeeping under the rubric of protection was clearly sent out in the UN’s Cruz report (2017), which insisted that all peacekeeping be robust. As David Curran explains, this turn towards the robust displaced emphasis on other approaches to conflict management and resolution, such as communication and mediation. Indeed, militarisation can undermine mediation, create backlash, and reduce political disputes to questions of protection and response (e.g., Duursma 2019). In relation to policing, as Charles Hunt demonstrates, it has contributed to a drift away from unarmed community-based policing towards more of a paramilitary style of policing typified by the Formed Police Units. What is more, within the context of peacekeeping’s changing temporality, militarisation also raises difficult questions about the relationship between robust protection by peacekeepers and counter-insurgency (COIN) operations, two types of operation treated independently until now but which increasingly exhibit similarities of objective, strategy, and form. With the notable exception of ONUC in the 1960s, a distinction emerged between UN peacekeepers and more robust military components operating on the same side. Thus, in Bosnia, UNPROFOR operated alongside NATO air forces, in Sierra Leone, UN forces operated alongside a more robustly postured British force, and in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and Mali (MINUSMA), UN forces operated alongside French forces. But as protection has come to define most peace operations those distinctions sometimes broke down. In the DRC, peacekeeping and robust enforcement were theoretically kept separate by the creation of the Force Intervention Brigade which was charged with specific counter-insurgency-like tasks dictated by threats to civilians whilst regular MONUSCO brigades continued to conduct regular peacekeeping activities, but it is not clear that local actors always made these distinctions. In Mali, despite intelligence sharing an organisational distinction was maintained between MINUSMA and French forces (Serval-Barkhane), but in practice the boundaries between robust peacekeeping and COIN were much less clear and the UN sustained around 175 casualties to hostile acts.

Although militarisation may be required in some circumstances, especially where civilians need protecting during ongoing war, it would be a mistake to conflate robust operations with protection itself, for the former is merely one means of achieving the latter. Whilst it may well be the most appropriate means in some circumstances, in some circumstances where levels of violence are very high it may not be peacekeeping that is needed but warfighting. At the other end of the conflict spectrum, where violence is low level and sporadic, protection may be better achieved and sustained in the longer term by unarmed activities as Rachel Julian’s contribution to this collection demonstrates. In most situations to which peacekeepers are deployed, which fall somewhere between these two poles, different combinations will likely be needed at different times and places. It is imperative, however, that practices of protection are not subsumed under the rubric of militarised peacekeeping and that such peacekeeping be understood as only one possible way in which the UN and others practice protection. Clearly needed is a broader understanding of agency with respect to the protection of civilians, one rooted in recognition of place (local and international), role (unarmed and armed), authority (state and non-state), and gender. In their different ways, the essays collected here exemplify that need and point us in the right directions.

Though not without its limitations, unarmed civilian protection involving the deployment of unarmed civilians into regions at risk of anti-civilian violence with the express purpose of protecting populations through presence, persuasion, and capacity building, remains a critically under-utilised resource, as Rachel Julian demonstrates. While this form of protection might be understood as a by-product of monitoring, observation, or other civilian operations undertaken by the United Nations and regional organisations such as the OSCE and the European Union (EU), unarmed civilian protection is an important field of practice in its own right, often spearheaded by NGOs such as Nonviolent Peaceforce. Operating with the consent of the host government, Nonviolent Peaceforce has civilian protection missions deployed in Myanmar, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Ukraine and has also responded to the crisis in Syria. Its work focuses on using dialogue with armed groups to dissuade them from violence against civilians, but unarmed civilian protection more broadly functions by utilising physical presence and moral pressure, peer pressure, and other forms of leverage to deter attacks on civilians. The 2015 report of the High-Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations (2015, p. 23) recognised the utility and importance of unarmed civilian protection, insisting that ‘unarmed strategies must be at the forefront of … efforts to protect civilians’. Still at an early stage, the theory and practice of unarmed civilian protection opens opportunities for strengthening the coordination of disparate strands of civilian protection work in areas such as mediation, observation, and capacity building. Yet despite its obvious potential, unarmed protection remains under-utilised. Only a tiny fraction of the personnel dedicated to a UN mission are engaged in this sort of work and NGOs are small in both scale and footprint. Likewise, unarmed protection remains a little understood and utilised concept that commands relatively modest resources that are stretched quite thin.

Recognising and working with multiple sites of agency improves protection in at least two important ways. First, the addition of layers of protection both widens the scope of protection – for local community protectors and unarmed civilian monitors can reach places armed UN peacekeepers cannot – and deepens it by adding capacities, techniques, skills, and material resources to the pool. Second, recognising multiple forms of agency encourages and promotes local leadership in protection. This can be a moral and political good in itself, but it can also be an instrumental good, since local leadership can improve the situational awareness of protection efforts as well as their sustainability.

Sovereignty Traps

During its evolution from aspiration to peripheral activity to the very core of what peacekeeping is for, the protection of civilians has been challenged persistently by concepts and practices of sovereignty. Several essays demonstrate how sovereignty continues to shape and skew practices of protection. In addition to that, however, by underscoring the need to situate the protection of civilians in UN peacekeeping within a broader continuum of time and agency, they point to the need not just to incorporate the civilian and unarmed but also, at the other end, the use of force beyond that which can be managed by UN peacekeepers. Concepts and practices of protection that cannot address the Rwanda or Syria question – of how to protect civilians from atrocity crimes deliberately perpetrated or supported by the national authorities – remain radically incomplete, affording protection to some but not others on grounds that, whilst politically and legally justifiable, are morally arbitrary.

The sovereignty problem I have in mind here stems from the fact that the host state has primary legal responsibility for the protection of civilians. It also has exclusive jurisdiction over its territory, such that only if the UN Security Council authorises enforcement action can any other state or organisation operate on that territory without the host state’s consent. This is not, of course, the only sovereignty problem that confronts peacekeeping. Sovereignty also entails ‘decision-making sovereignty’ – each state’s determination to protect its own capacity for autonomous decision-making – something which not only affects mandate-making but also the receptiveness and conduct of troop contributing countries. The host state problem is that the government is as likely as any other actor to perpetrate atrocities against civilians. In the DRC and South Sudan, for example, peacekeepers are deployed into situations of ongoing civil war where national armed forces and their allies perpetrate atrocity crimes and other human rights abuse as regularly as non-state armed groups. Questions about preventing, reacting to, and rebuilding after civil war tend therefore to be framed around an enduring struggle between sovereignty and human rights, one in which sovereignty still wins out, distorting the practice of civilian protection. By this account, sovereignty refers to the rights that states enjoy to territorial integrity, political independence, and non-intervention, whilst human rights refer to the idea that individuals ought to enjoy certain fundamental freedoms by virtue of their humanity. Where sovereign states, their agents, or allies are either unwilling or unable to protect the fundamental freedoms of their citizens, sovereignty and human rights come into conflict.

This tension is evident in the UN Charter itself, which is pulled in three different directions on the question of the relationship between rights and sovereignty. First, a strong impetus for the outlawing of war as an instrument of policy. Thus, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter forbade the threat or use of force in international politics, with only two exceptions: each state’s inherent right to self-defence (Article 51) and collective measures authorised by the UN Security Council (Chapter VII). Second, the principles that peoples had a right to govern themselves found in the UN Charter’s commitment to ‘mutual respect for sovereignty’, the blanket ban on force mentioned earlier, and Article 2(7) prohibiting the UN from interfering ‘in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of states’. Third, however, was the UN Charter’s commitment to human rights, a commitment written into the Organisation’s very purpose at its birth in the commitment to ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’ whilst also promising to ‘practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours’. This three-way tension created a set of political dilemmas that shapes every aspect of the practice of civilian protection. The dilemmas revolve around the problem of what the UN and its member states should do in situations where national authorities, their agents and allies commit atrocity crimes against civilians. Where, in other words, they must choose between respecting sovereignty and maintaining faith in fundamental human rights.

Politically, the UN’s member states still tend to privilege sovereignty over fundamental human rights when forced to choose. For example, in the face of widespread and systematic crimes against humanity perpetrated by the government of Sudan in Darfur, Pakistan argued against collective action on the grounds that ‘the Sudan has all the rights and privileges incumbent under the United Nations Charter, including to sovereignty, political independence, unity and territorial integrity’ (S/PV.4988, 11 June 2004, p. 4). These arguments are still sometimes used by liberal states as well. The US, for example, argued against the International Criminal Court in the Security Council, arguing that the court ‘strikes at the essence of the nature of sovereignty’ by purportedly sitting in judgement over the conduct of a state’s internal affairs (S/PV.5158, 31 March 2005, p. 3).

In many respects, the protection of civilians in UN peacekeeping emerged as an artful solution to this problem, a way of advancing protection where possible without challenging sovereignty head-on. This is done by containing protection within a practice – peacekeeping – that is constitutionally bound to sovereignty through the principle of consent. This solution allows protection to be extended where it can without disrupting international society’s normative priors. But whilst the protection of civilians in peacekeeping certainly increases the overall pool of global protection and strengthens the life chances of civilians in many of the world’s most conflict-ridden places, it remains a sovereignty-bound activity. This is a tension that Hunt does well to identify. When UN peacekeeping mandates authorise the use of ‘all necessary means’ to protect civilians they do not actually mean all means necessary but only those means likely to be approved of by the host government. Indeed, sometimes this is made explicit in the mandate which might temper the authority to use force to protect civilians with the clause that peacekeepers must not prejudice the authority of the host state. But if it is the host state or its agents committing atrocity crimes, then peacekeepers must choose between these two ideals – civilian protection and respect for state sovereignty. This problem is well demonstrated by Kilroy and Ryan who show how the limitations and obstacles imposed on UNMISS by the government of South Sudan, as well as the imperative to maintain host state consent, restricted the peacekeepers’ options and limited their effectiveness. Though mandates leave the choice ambiguous, and the rhetoric of the UN leadership consistently implies that protection should be privileged, in practice sovereignty is almost always privileged over protection when the two collide. Beyond UN missions, deference to sovereignty places some threatened populations beyond protection – a problem I will return to later. Deference to sovereignty also distorts protection practices inside UN missions. Peacekeepers, in practice, cannot discharge their mandate to protect impartially for they must always distinguish between state and non-state perpetrators, and their freedom of action in dealing with the former is far more constrained than it is with the latter. Indeed, the UN’s deference to sovereignty may make its peacekeeping missions complicit in the very atrocity crimes they are meant to be protecting civilians from. Since most UN missions are tasked to assist national authorities in areas such as the maintenance of order, the rule of law, or institution building – the extension of national authority often being a key benchmark for success – the mission itself is morally implicated when those national authorities use their capacities to commit atrocity crimes (von Billerbeck and Tansey 2019). In such cases, it is not just that UN peacekeepers may treat similarly imperilled civilians differently depending on who is imperilling them, but that by funnelling material resources, legitimacy, and other forms of assistance to national authorities – which by dint of the fact that armed hostilities are often continuing is itself a combatant party not a neutral arbiter – the UN may be helping the perpetrators. It is thus important to recognise that the protection of civilians in UN peacekeeping continues to be shaped by sovereignty and to better understand how this influences practice and outcomes within missions.

This brings us to one of the most difficult questions of all, and one that few wish to address directly. More than two decades ago, I complained that political and scholarly debates about humanitarian emergencies were focused too heavily on the interveners and insufficiently on the victimised populations (Bellamy 2003). Specifically, that scholarly debate always started with the interveners and tended to focus on their point of view – their legal quandaries, their interests. I argued that we should, instead, start at the other end, by thinking about the wellbeing of people, asking what threatens them and what might be done about it. In some respects, the protection of civilians does just that by centring the protection of people not that of states, political orders, or other interests. Yet, still, the conditions of possibility for protection are determined more by the politics and laws of intervention than by protection needs themselves. It is well established that the depth and quality of host state consent is central to the effectiveness of civilian protection as the essay by Duursma, Gorur, and Lindberg Bromley well demonstrates. For one thing, peacekeepers achieve better effects when they cooperate closely with national authorities. For another, UN peacekeepers are much more effective at protecting civilians from non-state armed groups than from their own government (Fjelde et al. 2019). What is more, thanks to the principle of consent, host states themselves get to determine whether peacekeepers are deployed at all. This seems to be based on the fiction that the state can be a neutral arbiter; that it does not have its own interests and that it has not been among the conflict parties. In civil wars, none of those things are true – the state is but one conflict party, whose very legitimacy is contested above the others, yet state violence is treated as less illegitimate than non-state violence simply because it is undertaken by the state. Consensual approaches to civilian protection can be easily swept away by determined and committed governments: Sri Lanka disregarded humanitarian protection when it pummelled the Tamils into submission in 2009; Syria repeatedly disregarded consensual protections including UN monitors, a UN Security Council demand to disarm chemical weapons and desist from using them, and a series of ‘safe zones’ agreements and hundreds of local ceasefires; Myanmar blithely disregarded consensual and unarmed civilian protection in Rakhine state and more recently in Kachin and Shan states too.

There are two issues here. First, that consensual measures, including peacekeeping, tend to have limited effect when leaders are intransigent and their governments and/or militaries are willing and able to employ atrocity crimes to prosecute their cause. Robust peacekeeping increasingly becomes like COIN and this is a problem because it is not well configured at the core of doctrine, concepts etc. – but there is a sovereignty means-ends problem. One option here may be a division of labour of the sort envisaged by Boutros-Ghali in his 1992 Agenda for Peace: UN peacekeepers armed only lightly, if at all, operating with the firm consent of national authorities to support institutions and local communities to build their own peace, whilst, when necessary, the use of military force to protect civilians is subcontracted to multinational coalitions by the UN Security Council. Such a division has begun to develop incrementally as in the UN-authorised AU mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the African-led Force Intervention Brigade in the DRC, and more recently, the Kenyan led mission to Haiti but whether this is a trend of merely the continuation of the Security Council’s case-by-case approach to peacemaking remains to be seen.¹

Second, that peacekeeping’s consent requirement sharply limits the populations that can be granted international protection. The principle of consent means that populations subjected to atrocity crimes in Sri Lanka, Syria, Myanmar, and elsewhere were never likely to be protected from atrocity crimes committed by their own government. If we believe that basic rights to live free from atrocity crimes are, or ought to be, universal then we need to think seriously about how to protect people from their own governments, the Leviathan can both perpetrate atrocities and simultaneously withhold consent from international actors.

It seems to me that we have three options here. The first is to simply admit that because the prospect of forcible humanitarian intervention is so distasteful, there will always be some peoples who cannot be protected. This is the logical consequence of most principled critiques of humanitarian intervention: the idea that such intervention ought not to happen. Logically, this should lead us to conclude that, for example, Western non-intervention during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was the right thing to do. Yet surprisingly few draw that conclusion. Most hew closely to the style of argument offered by Menon (2016, p. 18) who claims that arguments for humanitarian intervention withstand ‘neither ethical nor practical scrutiny’ yet also insists that the horrors of Rwanda ‘should have compelled any principled intervener’. We could, though, insist that, as a matter of principle, international actors do more to protect some populations than others based on whether and to what extent the recognised sovereign authorities consents to it. That would amount to arguing that the human right to protection from atrocity crimes derives not from universal principle or legal obligation, and not even from national legislation – for a government may violate its own laws and still refuse to consent to foreign interference – but from the consent of that individual’s government. There are few, I think, who would be willing to draw that conclusion. The second option is to argue that consent places limits on what might be done to protect civilians but that there are always radical policy alternatives for protecting populations in ways that do not involve violating a state’s sovereignty. Unarmed civilian protection is one, though some level of consent would be needed for that too. The most common suggestion in this regard is that concerned states should open their borders and encourage people to save themselves from atrocities by fleeing and receiving refuge. There is much to commend this option, flight can be a useful pathway to self-protection and refugee protection is significantly underutilised. But this offers no protection to those unwilling or unable to flee and incentivises atrocity crimes, for what better way could there be for a government to rid itself of a troublesome population than to commit some atrocities and then expect the whole population to flee into the arms of foreign powers, presumably never to return? The third option is to extend our conversations about the protection of civilians to include humanitarian intervention: the use of force to protect civilians without the consent of the state. This is to argue that instead of regarding humanitarian intervention as a species of activity entirely divorced from the protection of civilians in UN peacekeeping we understand them to be related practices, different ways of responding to threats to peoples’ lives in different sorts of contexts. Unless awkward questions about non-consensual intervention are included in our discussions, civilian protection will remain uneven and selective – the selectivity itself derived in large part from the rights assigned to some perpetrators of atrocity crimes at the expense of their victims.

Though the essays gathered in this collection focus only on UN peacekeeping, together they make a compelling case about the urgent need to extend our thinking and research on the theory and practice of civilian protection to broaden understanding of agency and time, and of how politics shape how protection is conceived and practiced. It is imperative to begin with those who need protection, their voices, perspectives, demands, and needs, and to make protection practice and the interests and norms of the practitioners secondary to that, for it is the ‘dignity and worth of the human person’ not the interests and needs of sovereigns or their international organisations that sits at the core of the UN Charter’s vision.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Allard Duursma, Sukanya Podder and Walt Kilroy for their immensely useful and insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex J. Bellamy

Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has previously been Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the International Peace Institute. His most recent book is Warmonger: Vladimir Putin’s Imperial Wars (2023).

Notes

1. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for raising this point.